UNTAPPD: New Beer App Makes Drinking (Virtually) Social

A little late for last year's check-in app rage, but just in time for the third annual LA Beer Week comes another new Android and iPhone app for beer geeks and casual macro-enjoyers alike.

UNTAPPD started out last year as a web app that allowed users to share their current beer choices with others in the cloud, but last week the company rolled out their official mobile app (which is free!), making it easier than ever to use beer's latest social-network on the go.

As FourSquare for beer, the app allows you to "check into" a specific brew you are drinking (which is beautiful imagery for those of us who have ever wanted to literally hang out inside of our favorite liquid). And just like Spotify and GetGlue, it will update your Facebook and Twitter with the news of what is going down at that very moment.

Sounds like a familiar concept to the types who insist on disclosing the innocuous details of their everyday life on Internet (or to beer geeks already involved with location-based beer apps such as Beerby and Taphunter), but UNTAPPD is more than just another instance of Twitter-inspired navel gazing.

Whether you're slamming Newcastle at Lucky Baldwins or sneaking a Pliny into the movie theater, this app goes beyond mere bragging rights, putting the focus on the nectar of the Gods itself by allowing users to both track their personal drinking history and find out what friends are currently digging into. Discovering new brews is also easy through a virtual pub that aggregates updates from the greater UNTAPPD community and features a panel of trending beers, kindly separated into macro and micro.

The 140-character limit on check-in descriptions makes beer reviews, when given, short and sweet. By eliminating room for the Sommelier-style methods of beer judgment so prevalent on traditional beer-sharing sites such as Beer Advocate, UNTAPPD removes much of the pretention associated with online craft beer sharing and opens up reviews to beer-lovers who don't care to dig into snobbish lexicon in order to describe an IPA that might as well just be "fucking awesome."

With descriptions as simple as "Soooo crisp!" and as unrelated as "Go team!" UNTAPPD allows Bud Light and Russian River drinkers to mingle together in an unassuming virtual venue.

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Sarah Bennett is a contributor at the L.A. Weekly and has spent nearly a decade as a freelance writer covering food, music, craft beer, arts, culture and all sorts of bizarro things that interest her for local, regional and national publications.